First Virtual Server - Please Help

R

rosco

Gawd
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Jun 22, 2000
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I'm going to be getting a new Poweredge T420 from Dell for this project. I am thinking I would like two virtual machines:
1 - Win2k12 Standard - Runs 3rd party program for office use
2 - Win2k12 Standard plus Windows SQL Server 2012 Standard - DB backend for 3rd party program in #1.

We need about 600GB of free space for data etc after the OS has been installed. This is for an office with 15 users.

How would you set this up. I am leaning towards VMWare ESXi v5.5 loaded on flash media. What would your configuration look like including backup solution etc?

I was thinking VMWare as I may want to virtualize a non-MS machine later on here.
 
we use hyper-v and it works great. It's a little easier to learn if you're more familiar with windows.
They're stable too. I have had a hyper-v server with no issues since ~2009 without any crashing.

Anything in particular you need help with?
 
If you go the flash drive route, make a copy of that drive, with configs, etc.

Run a simple 2 Bay RAID 1 NAS and dump your VMs there periodically. Would also serve as a backup point for your SQL DB. You can never have too many backup sets.
 
I guess I was wondering about backup software I would want to also purchase etc. I have a little experience with ESXi so I was leaning that direction. Nothing extensive though.

What kind of RAID/Drive config would you suggest for what I am looking at setting up? One RAID10 10k RPM SAS array?
 
I am thinking 4x 15GB SAS in RAID10. 200 GB or so for the two Win2k12 installs and then about 1TB left for data storage.

How would that perform? Would I be better off with a smaller RAID1 array for the OS installs and then RAID10 for data/SQL DB only?

How much memory should I plan on? I am thinking 32GB since memory is fairly cheap.
 
:)

I meant 4x 600GB 15k RPM SAS.

Dell is recommending that I put the core OS and Hyper V Hypervisor on a 146GB RAID1 array.
 
If you know ahead of time that your guest OSes are only going to be Windows 2008+, then Hyper-V is a great choice. ESXi (/vSphere free) also works great if you are already familiar with it and know its limitations.

RAID1 is a fine choice for the Hypervisor itself (whichever platform you choose) but 146GB is probably massive storage overkill if it's just a place for the hypervisor to live. You definitely want the VMs themselves on their own storage pool like you've planned for.
 
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